Digital Parenting Minute

Limit App Access on a Mac

Can your kid launch any app on your Mac? Could they video chat with stranger? You can control access to apps and features like the camera using the built-in parental controls that come with your computer.

Transcript

Do you guys have a Mac in your home? We know a lot of you do. You’ve been enjoying the episodes we’ve had the last couple of weeks on the Mac. Well today, we’re going to give you even more information on what you can do on your Mac. We’re going to show you how you can take the child account and you can control what apps your child can use while they’re using that child account. So again, we’re going to make you a better digital parent in just 60 seconds. Here we go.

To limit app access on our Mac, the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to go to system preferences. So let’s click on the apple menu and then go down to system preferences. Now from here, we’re going to click on parental controls. Now, to make this work, you’re going to have to have an account for each of your children and with this case, we created a sample child account in a previous episode that we’ll send you a link to. Now, let’s click on the lock icon. That’s going to allow us to actually go in and make changes here, then we’re going to click on the child that we want to edit the settings for.

Now here, under the apps tab, which will be selected by default, it allows you to do a few things. You can turn on and off the camera. We’ll disable that. It allows you to turn on and off game center. We’ll turn that off. And now, we can go down to the section that says, “Limit applications on this Mac.” You want to be sure that this is selected.

Then you can go in and actually look at either all the apps by hitting these triangles or you can actually go in and type in a specific app. I know I have Chrome installed and Safari on this particular computer and so, we want to make sure that those are disabled. This would be a good use case if your child had a few apps that you had already installed. Maybe like some educational apps and you want to disable just general web access.